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King’s Research Portal DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2019.1702789 Document Version Peer reviewed version Link to publication record in King's Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Harris, A. G. (2019). ‘Lady Doctor among the “Called”’: Dr Letitia Fairfield and Catholic medico-legal activism beyond the bar. Women's History Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2019.1702789 Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on King's Research Portal is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Post-Print version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections. 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Sep. 2021 ‘Lady Doctor among the “Called”’: Dr Letitia Fairfield and Catholic medico-legal activism beyond the bar Alana Harris† Senior Lecturer in Modern British History, King’s College London, London, UK Abstract Dr Letitia Fairfield’s admission to Middle Temple in 1923 is often a footnote in descriptions of her trailblazing career as a public health official and Catholic controversialist. Yet while she did not practise as a barrister, her legal formation, powers of oratory and fascination with jurisprudence were enduring legacies in a long and illustrious career. Whether providing intellectual resources to tackle the Eugenics Society or practical tools to adjudicate the relationship between remedial medicine and the State, Fairfield’s legal ethics were founded on her interpretation of the Judeo-Christian roots of the English common law. In her enduring jurisprudential commitment to the rights and dignity of the individual, Fairfield’s call to the bar was another aspect of her feminism and lifelong pursuit of the politics of conscience. Keywords: Letitia Fairfield, Middle Temple, London County Council, Medicine, Catholicism † Alana Harris [email protected] Room C3, East Wing Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, UK Introduction Under the leader ‘Rebel with Many Causes’, the Irish Independent Times covered Dr Letitia Fairfield’s lecture tour of Ireland in November 1957. Delivering three separate addresses to vastly differing audiences over consecutive nights – the Medical Missionaries of Mary (Drogheda), the (Irish) Medico-Legal Society, and the Women’s Graduate Association of University College Dublin – the newspaper offered a detailed character portrait of this indefatigable seventy-two-year-old and her breadth of expertise, praising: The flashes of the rebel which brought her in her teens into the ranges of the suffragists and Fabianism. An outspoken woman, she does not believe that a spade becomes less of a spade by being buried in silence. … Fiery in argument, she will carry the banner of controversy to the enemy, even out of the hands of her own team. She is incalculable without being mercurial …1 Similar reflections on Fairfield’s energy and lively intellect characterised the death notices offered in multiple newspapers and professional publications more than two decades later.2 Douglas Woodruff, her friend, and former editor of the intellectual Catholic weekly The Tablet, opened his obituary by reflecting: For over half a century, at any serious Catholic meeting in London, there was likely to be in the company one person who could be relied upon to make a spirited intervention … while she was a trenchant speaker and a seizer of bulls by the horns, she was good-tempered and eminently fair- minded.3 Another Catholic newspaper concurred: ‘She was a woman of remarkable energy and a formidable opponent on the debating platform in an age when public debate ranked as one of the entertainments of the day’.4 A lengthy obituary in The Times outlined her distinguished career as ‘the first woman to become a London County Council (LCC) senior medical officer’, as well as ‘her interests cover[ing] a wide field’ and expertise mobilised by the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Health and the War Office (RAMC and ATS) in First and Second World Wars.5 Only in its penultimate paragraph did the tribute mention briefly her (there undated) call by Middle Temple to the bar – Fairfield’s legal proficiencies were subsumed within a piece testifying to her tireless public service. Curiously, it was an obituary in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (an organisation with which Fairfield became actively involved on her retirement) that headlined her role – celebrated within this special issue – in the very first tranche of women to go to the bar. In an intimate eulogy, the intersections between her training as a Middle Temple barrister and ‘the brilliance, the learning, the quickness of mind and the trenchant wit that characterized her long career’ were acknowledged and interrogated.6 With such widespread testaments to her powers of oratory, her love of adversarial debate and her passionate embrace of progressive politics, why did Fairfield not proceed from her call to the bar on 26 January 1923 to a stellar career as a barrister? How did her legal training contribute to her long career in public health, feminist politics and Catholic controversy? And was the law, as a discipline but also a profession synonymous with status and ‘the establishment’, an essential yet underappreciated buttress to Fairfield’s formidable career as one of the leading civil servants and public intellectuals in interwar Britain? This article attempts to answer some of these questions. Moreover, it constitutes the first sustained exploration of the intersections between Letitia Fairfield’s noteworthy career as a medical bureaucrat and her unnoticed presence within the first generation of women lawyers. It contends that Fairfield’s classification as a ‘quasi-lawyer’ (given that she did not practise after admission) underestimates the importance of her legal training and the ways in which she used it in her professional responsibilities and personal politics.7 Far from a minor footnote in her pre-eminent career as a public health professional, Fairfield’s engagement with legal frameworks and jurisprudence was central to her professional identity and activism. It shaped her forthright sparring with the neo-Malthusian orthodoxies of the day and the (narrowly avoided) swing in interwar Britain towards the ‘positive eugenics’ of voluntary sterilisation. Reading for the bar was complementary to her enduring interest in the relationship between medicine and the remedial powers of the State (especially around delinquency and mental degeneracy). In the end, it resulted in her enduring fascination with criminal law and the rules of evidence. Finally, given her passionate investment in her Catholic faith, a thorough knowledge of the intricacies of the common law (and its Judeo-Christian foundations, as she historicised it) sustained Fairfield’s efforts across a dizzying array of public platforms to articulate a clear and robust medico-moral code. This would lead her into public controversies on issues such as birth control, homosexuality, and the laws of insanity. Within these fields, she was a passionate advocate for an understanding of rights as inherent to human nature (i.e. as ‘natural law’) and as a sure guide to adjudicate plans for law reform or the dispensation of justice. In Fairfield’s own estimation, far from being a ‘rebel with many causes’, her life’s commitments, civil service and legal interests were bound together by a politics of social service and passionate conscience. Portrait of a pioneering ‘quasi-lawyer’ Considering her contributions to the field of public health, her place amongst the very first women called to the bar in England and her involvement in some of the most prominent social issues of the century, Letitia Fairfield has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. She is briefly sketched in a survey entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,8 has garnered an occasional mention in the histories of women’s involvement in the medical profession,9 and is named-checked, without sustained analysis, in scattered and disparate historiographies.10 Even more surprisingly, her ‘legal career’ has evaded any sustained analysis. Some of the explanation for this might vest with Fairfield herself. In a life history interview – focused admittedly on her suffrage activism and the interwar birth control movement – the ninety-two-year old did not mention her time at the Inns of Court nor the ways in which her legal knowledge informed her medical administration or activist politics.11 So what led Dr Josephine Letitia (Lettie) Denny Fairfield